Kazakhstan's quick 'Manhattan'

President Nazarbayev is putting his stamp on the capital at a furious pace

February 24, 2008|By Alex Rodriguez, TRIBUNE CORRESPONDENT

ASTANA, Kazakhstan — At the top of the "Tree of Life" Tower in the heart of this remote capital, visitors can put a hand in the large, gold handprint of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, a gesture locals say brings luck. At a ceiling-to-floor window a few feet away, they can see the Kazakh leader's handprint across the rest of Astana's skyline.

Nazarbayev wanted Kazakhs to lap up summer when Astana shivers in subzero Januaries, so legions of construction workers are building a 500-foot-tall tent that will cocoon beaches, palm trees, waterfalls and a small river. To shield his shimmering city from icy steppe winds in winter and dust storms in summer, Nazarbayev has ordered his government to sheathe the capital in a ring of birch, poplar and fir.

On visits to Moscow, Nazarbayev was struck by the grandeur of government buildings Stalin built, so he had a copy of one made in Astana. Even the tower itself, a structure that can't escape comparisons to a dowager's brooch, began as a sketch Nazarbayev scrawled on a sheet of paper.

"These objects are like his children," said Amanzhol Chikanayev, Astana's chief planner. "Our task is to fulfill his dreams."

Those dreams are big, flamboyant and non-negotiable. Kazakhstan's only leader since the former Soviet republic gained its independence in 1991, Nazarbayev controls every inch of the world's ninth-largest country, but nowhere in this Central Asian petro-state is his sway more obvious than in Astana, a city of 600,000 surrounded by miles of uninhabited flatland.

In 1997, Nazarbayev moved the country's capital from the southern city of Almaty to Astana, and since then he has been using billions of dollars of Kazakhstan's oil wealth to morph this former Cossack outpost into a plate-glass Xanadu that Chikanayev calls "Manhattan on the Steppe."

The pace of construction has been furious -- too furious, say some critics, who argue that proportionality and basic workmanship have been sacrificed in the name of haste. Astana's fierce winds have blown poorly affixed tiles off the facades of newly built apartment high-rises, said local architect Serik Rustambekov. Leaky roofs forced overhauls at the newly constructed Nur-Astana Mosque and National Archive Building.

"The volume of construction here is huge," said Rustambekov, a member of the Astana Town Planning Council. "And for the sake of meeting deadlines, the right techniques sometimes aren't followed. We're paying the price for that right now."

An iron fist

No one in Astana, however, is in a position to tell Nazarbayev to slow down, Rustambekov said. Like the leaders of surrounding ex-Soviet republics, Nazarbayev governs with an iron fist and keeps both political opposition and the country's media on a tight leash. In Kazakhstan, however, there is a difference: Nazarbayev's government is blessed with the world's 11th-largest oil and natural gas reserves, as well as the world's second-largest uranium deposits. Analysts predict that by 2015, Kazakhstan will break into the ranks of the world's Top 10 leading oil producers.

Although Nazarbayev has teams of architects, planners and engineers assigned to remake Astana, "he often says he's the country's chief architect," Rustambekov said. "He listens to reports, makes corrections, decides and ensures those decisions are fulfilled."

Nazarbayev's decision to move the capital to Astana angered Kazakh lawmakers and bureaucrats, who had grown accustomed to Almaty's gentler climate and mountain vistas. But Almaty is in the southeast corner of Kazakhstan, and Nazarbayev wanted the country's capital to be more centrally located.

Nazarbayev's vision of Astana is a radical departure from the look and feel of the rest of ex-Soviet Central Asia, where vast tracts of drab, colorless apartment blocks and boxy, columned government buildings dominate.

Across the street from the "Tree of Life" Tower, the new egg-shaped National Archive dazzles at night, illuminated in alternating shades of green, blue, purple and white. Farther east, a glass-and-stone pyramid designed by famed British architect Norman Foster houses Nazarbayev's Palace of Peace and Harmony, which combines a meeting hall for world religious leaders with a 1,500-seat opera house. The use of funicular elevators along one side of the building leaves the pyramid's skylight-illuminated atrium open and uncluttered.

Foster also designed Khan Shatyr, the massive $140 million tent city now under construction at the western edge of Astana and scheduled to be completed this summer. The translucent plastic canopy will keep the inside at 80 degrees, warm enough to sustain terraced gardens, cascades and beaches when the steppe outside freezes over.

"It'll be like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon," Chikanayev said.

Nazarbayev's to-do list doesn't stop there. Future projects include a velodrome, a zoo with animals from all seven continents in glass domes, a rose-shaped concert hall, a high-tech university for 25,000 students and two elevated high-speed train lines.